Is it natural for humans to make war ​…

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Rhiannon R
Rhiannon Jul 31, 2013 20:07:41
Replying to Mustard

No - someone with a single light reacting cell does have a huge advantage over someone who hasn't got any light reacting cells at all! You can detect whether it's day or night, or whether somebody's leaning over you about to eat you - it's hugely beneficial. If you're a bit of phytoplankton, you can move into the light to photosynthesise, not sit in the dark or just wander around randomly. And if you've got 100 light reacting cells, you're potentially 100 times better off. You might even be able to form an image of what's out there. Pixels and that.

T thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Jul 31, 2013 20:15:04
Replying to Rhiannon

I don't see anything implausible there. Otherwise you're heading into "intelligent design" territory which is just Creationism-dressed-as-Science as far as I can tell.

M Mustard
Mustard Jul 31, 2013 20:15:31
Replying to Rhiannon

Rhiannon wrote:
No - someone with a single light reacting cell does have a huge advantage over someone who hasn't got any light reacting cells at all! You can detect whether it's day or night, or whether somebody's leaning over you about to eat you - it's hugely beneficial. If you're a bit of phytoplankton, you can move into the light to photosynthesise, not sit in the dark or just wander around randomly. And if you've got 100 light reacting cells, you're potentially 100 times better off. You might even be able to form an image of what's out there. Pixels and that.
I think that's a huge leap. If a simple organism is suddenly born with a single-cell, light-sensitive mutation, how does it know what to do with the information that that cell provides? How is that cell even wired into its brain? How does it provide a survival advantage, when the creature doesn't even know what this new information means?

Happy to agree to differ, but I simply don't believe that evolution and natural selection have been adequately explained. This makes interesting reading:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong